Saturday, November 14, 2015

Software to filter through EiBi schedule

One of the important aspects of shortwave listening is identifying the shortwave station you're listening to. The EiBi schedule is an exhaustive list of stations along with their respective frequencies and transmit times. It is my most-used shortwave listening resource.

When I still used analog radios, I would have to wait until the top of the hour and listen for the name or callsign, hoping there was no interference, then go search in Excel to find the frequency. Now that I have SDR, I can accurately pinpoint the frequency. Needless to say, this makes it much easier to find out what the station is. However, usually multiple stations use the same frequency at the same time, and not all stations transmit 24/7. The EiBi schedule gives times in UTC, but it's time-consuming to convert all those UTC time ranges, plus you might make a mistake if you do it in your head (you know, forgetting to "wrap" when you cross 24 or 0.)

Because of all this, I wrote a small Windows program to go through the EiBi CSV-format schedule and populate a list of what's currently on based on your PC's time. You just give it an EiBi *.CSV file and your offset from UTC and it does the rest. I even added an option to show only DRM stations.

I live on the East Coast so I originally hard-coded a timezone of -5, but I updated it recently for international use. Just enter your timezone to replace -5. The program should remember your CSV file and timezone between sessions.


Download an EiBi schedule (get the CSV file)

Download eibiscanner.zip

Unzip the ZIP to a folder and run eibiscanner.exe.
Note: You must unzip everything or it will not run


Feel free to comment on this software.

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